Episode 2. The First Week, May 24 – 31.
Since the first week was mostly all travel days, there will be a few less pretty pictures than I hope to share in the future. Hopefully you’ll still find it interesting.
We were all loaded up on Friday morning and started the trip with a slightly longer driving day than we usually prefer, but it was the first day and the excitement of starting this trip made it not so bad. Our destination for the night, Muleshoe, TX was about 330 miles away. We bucked a major headwind the entire way which wreaked havoc on our fuel mileage and caused us to make an unplanned fuel stop along the way instead of making it the whole way to Muleshoe. We were averaging just over 8 mpg. Our stay was at a city park that offered full-hookups for free, although we did drop some money into the contribution box.
The following day we moved to a free dry-camping spot at a Harvest Host in Moriarty, NM. Again, the wind was pretty brutal and our fuel mileage dropped to just 7.7 mpg. I’m really hoping that our mileage will increase throughout this trip as fuel cost will probably be our largest expense. During our stay there, some 40+ mph gusts really rocked the trailer and stirred up a lot of dust, so I didn’t get any pictures of our stop.
Sunday, we broke up our next move by making stops at two National Monuments; El Malpais Nat’l. Mon. and El Morro Nat’l. Mon., not far from Gallup, NM. Both parks turned out to be big surprises and we’d wished we’d planned an extra day in there to explore them both more thoroughly, especially El Morro. We did watch the park video at both visitor centers, but didn’t have time to do some of the hikes that were available there. We’ve definitely added these parks to our to-do list for our next trip out west.
We stayed the night at the Fire Rock Casino in Gallup. The casino allows RV’ers to stay in their overflow parking for free. The view that we had was amazing and the weather perfect. The only downside was that we were pretty close to a railroad track that BNSF was really making good use of. In spite of the train noise, it didn’t keep either of us from getting a good night’s sleep. With our solar/lithium setup, we had no need for any kind of hookups. This will make traveling on our way through Canada and Alaska much easier and we can travel at our own pace since we don’t really need to make campground reservations. Canada and Alaska have an extraordinary number of free camping sites, which we hope to be able to share with you as we go along.
On Monday, Memorial Day, we woke up to a beautiful morning with temps in the upper-30’s, and were able to watch a hot-air balloon rising over the cliffs out of our window while we had coffee. We then continued west on I-40 (which was GREATLY improved since our last trip through this area). We broke up the day with a stop in Winslow, AZ to visit the “Standing on the corner” location. It was one of those touristy things that you just have to do sometimes and it broke up our travel day quite well. Our destination for the day was a National Forest campground just a couple of miles off of the interstate near Williams, AZ. The spot was beautiful, surrounded by tall pine trees. Even though there were no hookups, the cool temperatures meant that we didn’t need to run the A/C. With no hookups at the site, that was a good thing. Also, since we had no cell service, we decided to take a test run of our “new” StarLink. It’s not really new as we bought it over a year ago, but the account has been on hold until we were ready to start out Alaska adventure. It worked flawlessly, even among all of the tall trees.
The next morning, we again awoke to temps in the upper-30’s, took our time getting everything ready to roll on to our next stop where we’d be staying for several days; Las Vegas, NV. While I-40 continued to surprise us with how smooth the road was, unlike the teeth-rattling ride it’s been the last couple of times, the drive along US-93 from Kingman, AZ to Las Vegas was absolutely horrible. That road is in need of some major repair, especially the right lane that gets so much semi traffic. We’re staying in Las Vegas for four nights and meeting all of my teammates to bowl in the USBC Open Championships. Not that I’m going to win anything or make a bunch of money, but it’s a fun thing that I’ve been doing for a long time; 31 consecutive years. We bowled the team event on Thursday night, and although we will make a little bit of money, emphasis on “little”, I didn’t bowl well at all. On Friday night, we bowled the doubles and singles events. There was a little redemption, winning back my bracket losses from the previous night. As far as tournament standings go, I’ll cash a small amount of money in the team and doubles events, but not in singles.
We did discover a couple of issues up to this point of our journey. The first was that a section of a blown tire on the highway had taken out a gate valve on our septic outlet. Although it didn’t cause any leaks or anything, it required a trip to the local RV dealer to get a replacement (and a spare, as this has happened before). The second was that we had notice that our water pump in the trailer seem to be struggling to prime itself sometimes. On a couple of occasions, I noticed that the pump would come on for about two seconds every half hour or so. I didn’t really think about it until we got to Las Vegas where we didn’t to use the pump, being hooked up to city water at the campground. Thinking that we might have a small leak in the system, I opened up the storage area, pulled out a section of the wall and found that we definitely had a leak where the plastic check-valve is located at the outlet to the hot water tank. Luckily, I had a spare check-valve that I’d bought a few years ago due to this being a known issue with trailer hot water tanks. Of course, when I disconnected the water line and tried to remove the cracked piece, the whole thing broke off leaving me with nothing to grab ahold of to twist out the remains. A less than fruitful trip to Home Depot, followed by some great help by my bowling doubles partner, David Harlin, and we were finally able to get the broken connection removed and the new metal check-valve installed. So, all is well with the water system, and we’ll finally be heading north on Saturday morning.
LyndDebTravel 